7 - Adoption Isn't All It's Cracked Up To Be - Chapter Seven
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TW: kidnapping, blood mention (used in a metaphor/simile)
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Danny woke up with an awful headache and an aching body to accompany it. Ancients, he missed his healing factor. This sucked. With a groan, he rolled over and stuffed his face into his pillow. His surprisingly plump pillow. In a groggy confusion, he narrowed his eyes and glared at the unstained, unflattened, clean and soft pillow that still bore an indentation from where his head had lain. This was not his pillow (or, if one was being accurate, the hotel’s pillow).
Well, he was wide awake now. Flying up (not literally, sadly), he took in the room with wide eyes. It was large, and lovingly decorated, with soft blue walls and shelves upon shelves of books. Fancy ones, too, all the old undecipherable ones that Danny always got bad scores on. The books were well worn, with creased spines and softened corners from years of use, but lacking any rips or tears, speaking to the reverence that whoever had loved these books had had for them. Danny’s books never got that kind of treatment. Danny’s books were always either with uncreased spines, forever unopened and forgotten, or with taped covers, dog-eared pages, and dropped unceremoniously on his rickety desk.
This was a bedroom, a bedroom belonging to a rich kid who loved books and who treated them with a respect that Danny never had the energy to give. This was a room with no glow in the dark stars scattered in constellations that took hours of painstaking work to get perfectly accurate. This was a room that was neat and cared for, opposing the jumble of clothes and dishes and half-finished homework that always lay strewn across Danny’s floor.
This was not a room for Danny. Which was honestly a relief, Danny thought, realizing the implications of a room tailored to him.
Cautiously getting up, Danny finally noticed the weight that hung heavy in the room. The air was stiff and stagnant, and it smelled like a sweater that had been left at the bottom of a wooden drawer, forgotten and passed over until a biting chill came. This was a room where time had gone on with only foreign visitors there to witness its static air and slow decay. The sense of decrepitude was pervasive. And yet, the room was pristine, spotless even.
It was like a room in a museum. No one sat on this furniture or slept in this bed or opened the window at night to hear the rain better. Caretakers kept the dust from collecting in the folds of the blankets and on the shelves that held the books, but the only people in this room were outsiders. Foreigners, imposters even. They did not belong. They did not love the books on the shelves or the shade of blue that adorned the walls or the silky texture of the sheets on the bed. They did not carefully choose the toys that sat on the windowsill or the color of the lava lamp on the desk or the placement of the bed or chair or that poster on the wall. They did not love the stuffed animal that sat forgotten on the bed (in fact, they did not even know that its name was Bennet) and they did not feel proud of the achievements on the wall. They did not live there.
And neither did Danny. It felt wrong to be in this room that was so clearly someone else’s. He felt like an imposter, like a cheap replacement for whoever had picked so much at the now frayed corner of the pillowcase. He didn’t want to be in this room anymore.
Another pounding beat of the headache reminded him forcefully of his situation. He wanted Jazz. Jazz would know what to do. Where was Jazz?
Okay, Danny, focus. You’ve been kidnapped, presumably, and are in a room that you should not be in. For both imposter reasons and kidnapping is bad reasons, he thought, Best thing to do is leave before whoever kidnapped you comes back, and get back to Jazz. Yes, Jazz.
The window proved to be an inadmissible path of escape. He was several stories up, and while he wouldn’t mind fucking up this rich fruitloop’s nice rosebushes, lacking his flight, he would surely break several bones concluding the trip down, so he decided against that route with a curse upon his luck. He did, however, take note of the fact that it was now daytime, midafternoon by the looks of it. Meaning that he had been out for at least ten hours. Not good. Jazz would be worried. He was worried.
The door opened silently and smoothly. No hinges lamented their fate and nothing caught upon the door to slow its languid swing. Danny found himself in a long hallway lit with yellow bulbs that bathed the rows and rows of closed doors in a melancholy light. Danny, who was already thoroughly frightened, felt his apprehension grow and his painfully slow heartbeat begin to quicken. Funny, almost, how his fear made him seem more human (regrettably, the Drs. Fenton had not seen it that way).
He padded softly against the lush carpet, bare feet shuffling along the luxurious patterned strands, contrasting the rough, creaking floorboards of the hotel that he had become accustomed to. This did not ease his tensions. If anything, it increased them. Why was he here, in a place so different, and how? They were clearly rich.
…Danny didn’t like rich kidnappers who gave him headaches. Honestly, the list of things he didn’t like was growing bigger and bigger with each passing day. Danny decided he didn’t approve, both of the growing list and of the situation (whatever it may be) that he was currently in.
The hallway stretched on, and as Danny trekked through it, dragging his feet in reluctance all the while, it seemed to warp and twist maliciously. The walls seemed to grow taller and loom nearer, closing him in, and the faces in the paintings seemed to stretch and distort, contorting into caricatures with leering eyes and cruel smiles with wicked teeth. And the carpet, the ornate Persian carpet. It seemed to unfurl further and further, a personal walkway through hell colored red as blood. Danny shivered and trudged on, shying away from the walls and the shining yellow lights that looked much too much like eyes.
Abruptly, he found himself at a stairwell. While the hallway had been much too hot for his liking, all close and warm and personal, the stairway was a cool marble, distant, cold, and unfeeling. That carpet continued, though, winding ever further in front of him. Eager, eager, eager to find the end of that harsh, glaring red (at least it wasn’t green, thank the Ancients it wasn’t green), Danny started down the stairs at a much faster pace, and only increased his speed, until he was tripping and stumbling his way down, the carpet as slippery as slick, wet blood. Finally, finally, the stairs and the carpet and the leering faces and the too-close walls came to an end, and he was met instead with a sea of shifting black hair and shiftier eyes, all of which were turned uncannily on him and stared wide and unblinking, watching, and waiting, though for what, Danny didn’t know. So he stood there, shivering, afraid, and utterly alone, stranded on an island amid an ocean of strangers.
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Ta-da! I'm really proud of this one, I think it turned out well and it was fun to write, so I hope y'all like it too! I also want you guys to notice that I named the stuffed animal after Pride and Prejudice characters that I 100% didn't google. Because I was pretty happy with that. Anyway, thank you for reading!
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